11/15/2025
This fall, on the heels of my visit to Scotland, I began a two-year apprenticeship in herbalism with the School of the Sacred Wild. It was there I found language for something I had long intuitively sensed: that healing is not fixing, but nourishing and nurturing. As Susan W**d writes of the Wise Woman tradition:
“We do not fix or cure or balance. We nourish health, wholeness, holiness… Problems become doorways of transformation.”
I often think this is where depth psychology and the Wise Woman path meet—in their refusal to rush the mystery. In both, we listen rather than diagnose. We allow the symptom, the sorrow, the very soil of our lives to speak back. We learn that the body, like the forest, has its own intelligence if we only sit quiet long enough to hear.
Too often, modern psychotherapy forgets this. I’ve seen too many instances in which the collaboration between client and practitioner devolves into a hunt for pathology. It should be a deep listening for what is wanted and needed. So often the suffering is, at least in part, caused by the overarching system of our culture that fails to leave space for nourishment.
So what if we let it be more simple? What if instead of digging and dissecting, we began first and foremost with nourishment? Whether it’s connection that soothes us, or ritual or rest. Maybe it’s the slow medicine of presence or meditation that does the trick. These are places to start.
Next week we will be announcing a week long retreat with in the Scottish Highlands with a deep focus on renewal and inner/outer re-wilding. Come flood your body with nourishment of all kinds with the support of herbalists, space holders, horses, cows, dogs, rushing streams and soft land. We will enchant you with story, ritual, adventure.
Save the dates: April 25-May 2. 🌀💧🌀
Images:
1. E.L. Trouvelot
2. Agnes Pelton
3. Via
4. David Lynch (ily)
5. Merrilee Thomas
6. Summer Wagner
7. Matthew Stone
8.
9. Synchrodogs
10. Debbie Parker
11. Marsha P. Johnson
12. Rainer wylde
13. Stephen Gill
14. Via .bruce
15. Gret Palucca
16. Angela Lane
17. Susun W**d excerpt
18. Magali Cazo
